Last day in Cordoba

For our last morning in Córdoba we visited the 8c Arab bath house. It was beautifully decorated and wonderfully elegant, but nearly all that has gone now, being stripped over the years to be used for other things. There are just some pieces of decorated wall plaster and column heads left, but it's still possible to follow the chambers through, going from the changing rooms to the cold, then warm and hot rooms, and the boiler room and heating ducts in the walls. Then on to one of only three remaining medieval synagogues in Spain, the others being destroyed when the Jews were forced to leave Christian Spain. The Jews left to go to Northern Africa, the Ottoman Empire where they remain, with Israel, today. They took with them their culture and Ladino language which was a mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic, which they still speak and gives rise to some beautifully evocative music. After wandering in the sun through the winding street of the old Jewish quarter we had a last tapas lunch by the river and got our train back to Jerez. Not the superfast high speed train, but still travelling on the high speed line as far as Seville and cruising at 250 kph!Read more